Tertullian · a new plain-English translation from the original language
[1] For this above all should have made you blush: that you allow him to be seen with Moses and Elijah in the privacy of the mountain — men whose destroyer he had supposedly come to be. This, clearly, is what that voice from heaven meant to convey: This is my beloved Son, hear him! — that is, not Moses any longer, and not Elijah. A voice alone, without the display of Moses and Elijah, would have sufficed. For in defining whom they were to hear, it forbade the hearing of any others whatsoever. [2] Or did it perhaps permit Isaiah and Jeremiah and the rest, whom it did not show, to be heard, while forbidding those it did show? Now even granting that their presence was necessary, they certainly would not have been shown conversing with him — for that is a mark of intimacy — nor sharing in his glory — for that is a token of favor and grace — but rather in some squalid state, which would be the proof of their destruction; or better, in the darkness of the Creator, which he had been sent to dispel, kept at a wide remove from the brightness of Christ, since he was going to strip their very words and letters out of his gospel. [3] Does he show them to be strangers by keeping them at his side? Does he teach that they are to be abandoned, by joining them to himself? Does he destroy them, by building them up with his own rays of glory? What would Christ have done with his own prophets? I suppose, true to form, he would have shown them looking exactly as Marcion's Christ ought to have shown any others he might have kept with him besides his own prophets! But why should the Creator's Christ show off preachers who are his own no more than they are the Creator's? Why appear to the very men to whom he had already appeared in revelations? Why converse with the very men who had once spoken his words? Why share his glory with those by whom the Lord of glory had been named? Why appear with his own chief officers — the one who was once the instructor of the people, the other its reformer in due time; the one who inaugurated the old covenant, the other who was to complete the new? [4] So Peter, rightly recognizing his own Master's fellowship in this unbroken continuity, offers his counsel: How good it is that we are present here (fitting indeed, seeing that Moses and Elijah are here too!), and let us build here three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah — but he spoke without grasping what he uttered. How, 'without grasping'? Was it simple confusion, or was it, as we argue in the case of the new prophecy, that ecstasy — that is, a going-out of the mind — belongs properly to grace? [5] For when a man finds himself placed within the Spirit, most of all as he gazes upon God's own splendor, or as God utters words through him, he cannot help but lose his everyday awareness, overshadowed as he is by divine power — a point on which there is dispute between us and the 'psychics.' Meanwhile it is easy enough to prove Peter's loss of mind. For how could he have recognized Moses and Elijah except in the Spirit — since the people had possessed no images or statues of them, likenesses being forbidden by the Law — unless he saw them in the Spirit? And thus, what he said while set in the Spirit and not in his ordinary senses, he could not properly have known he was saying. [6] But if he was mistaken here in the sense of being in error — supposing Christ belonged to Moses and Elijah — then it is already established, going back to when Peter was asked by Christ whom they took him to be, that he answered as of the Creator, You are the Christ; because if he had at that time recognized him as belonging to another god, he would not have erred here either. But if he erred here for the same reason he erred there, then it is certain that, all the way down to that particular day, Christ had disclosed no divinity previously unknown, and Peter had not yet erred, Christ having as yet revealed nothing of the kind; and Christ was, for that whole span, to be reckoned none other than the Creator's, whose entire order he expressed here as well. [7] He takes three of his disciples as witnesses of the coming vision and voice. This too belongs to the Creator. In the mouth of three witnesses, it says, every word shall stand. He withdraws onto a mountain. I recognize the pattern of the place. For the Creator had also initiated his former people at a mountain, with both vision and voice of his own. It was fitting that on that same kind of height the new covenant should be sealed, in the very place where the old had been written, under that same enveloping cloud too — which no one will doubt was gathered from the Creator's own sky, unless he had brought his own clouds down there as well, since he had also broken through the Creator's heaven to make his own way! Or else he made free, uninvited use of the Creator's cloud-cover. [8] So the cloud was not silent even now, but the familiar voice came from heaven, and the Father's fresh testimony over the Son — the same voice as in the first psalm: You are my Son, today I have begotten you. Of whom also, through Isaiah: Who, fearing God, will hear the voice of his Son? [9] And so now, presenting him, This is my Son — obviously to be understood as, whom I promised. For if he had once promised, and afterward says, This is he — it belongs to the one who once made the promise to use the voice of one now producing what was promised, not to one to whom the reply could be made, But who are you, to say, This is my Son — of whom you announced nothing beforehand any more than you revealed yourself as what you formerly were? [10] Hear him, then, whom from the beginning he had proclaimed must be heard under the title of prophet, since he was also destined to be reckoned a prophet by the people. A prophet, said Moses, God will raise up for you from among your own brothers, according, that is, to a fleshly reckoning — as you have heard me, so shall you hear him; and whoever will not hear him shall be cut off from among his people. So too Isaiah: Whoever among you stands in fear of God, let that one give ear to the Son's own voice. Which the Father himself was about to commend; for, it says, setting forth the words of his Son, by saying, precisely, This is my beloved Son, hear him. [11] So even if the hearing was transferred from Moses and Elijah to Christ, it was not as from one god to another, nor to some other Christ, but from the Creator to his own Christ, according to the passing away of the old covenant and the succession of the new. Not an envoy, says Isaiah, nor a messenger, but God himself shall save them — he himself now preaching and fulfilling the Law and the Prophets. [12] The Father, then, handed over new disciples to the Son, having first shown him together with Moses and Elijah in the privilege of that glory, and then having dismissed them, as though their office and honor had already been discharged — so that this very fact should confirm, against Marcion, that there is fellowship even of Christ's glory with Moses and Elijah. And we find the whole pattern of this vision in Habakkuk too, where the Spirit, speaking at times in the person of the apostles, says: Lord, I have heard your report, and I was afraid. What report, if not that heavenly voice declaring: This is my dearly loved Son, listen to him? I considered your works, and I was struck out of my mind. When, if not at that moment, gazing on his glory, when Peter spoke without grasping what he uttered? Between two living creatures shall you be made known — Moses and Elijah. Of whom Zechariah too saw a figure, in the two olive trees and the two olive branches. [13] For these are the ones of whom it was said, Two sons of fatness stand by the Lord of all the earth. And again the same Habakkuk: His power covered the heavens — that same cloud, no doubt — and his brightness shall be as the light — the very brightness with which he too was clothed and shone. And if we recall the promise made to Moses, we shall find it here fully paid in full. [14] For when Moses had desired to see the Lord's face, saying, If then I have found grace in your sight, show yourself to me, that I may see you knowingly — desiring that vision in which he would be acting as man, as the prophet well knew. But he had already been told, No human being shall look upon God's face and remain alive. And this word which you have spoken, he says, I will do for you. [15] And again Moses: Show me your glory. And the Lord likewise, of the future: I will go before you in my glory, and so on. And at the last: And then you shall see my hinder parts — not loins, not calves, but the glory he had desired, to be revealed in the latter times. In this, he had promised himself to him visible face to face — as he also said to Aaron, Should there be a prophet raised up in your midst, it is to that one I shall make myself known through a vision, addressing him by means of a vision, but not so with Moses: mouth to mouth I will converse with him, openly and plainly (that is, of course, of the man's form he was going to bear), not in riddles. [16] For even if Marcion did not wish him shown conversing with the Lord, but only standing, still, even standing, he stood mouth to mouth and face to face with him — with him, mind you, not outside him — in his very glory, let alone merely in his sight. And from that glory he departed no less radiant from Christ than Moses used to be from the Creator, striking, then as now, the eyes — then of the children of Israel, now of the blinded Marcion, who failed to see that this argument too tells against himself.
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